Reliable PPO-Based Concurrent Multipath Transfer for Time-Sensitive Applications

Time-sensitive applications, e.g., Internet of vehicles applications and tactile Internet applications, put forward low latency and high throughput requirements for communication. However, due to the dynamical network conditions, frequent retransmission will produce undesirable latency and reduce throughput. This article proposes a reliable proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based concurrent multipath transfer mechanism (RpCMT) that can reduce retransmission probability, as a consequence, achieves low latency and high throughput. In particular, RpCMT employs in-network telemetry (INT)-based network-aware transmission control algorithm to make dynamical multipath transfer control depending on the link conditions. To generate precise transfer control policy, we formulate multipath flow scheduling as a minimization problem that considers both the link bandwidth utilization and transmission queuing length. Then, we propose a PPO-based multipath transfer policy updating algorithm to obtain the optimized control policy. Finally, we build a P4-based prototype system in which RpCMT is implemented to make experimental analysis. Experimental results show that RpCMT outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions, e.g., weighted random routing (W-Random) and link weighted based ECMP (W-ECMP), in terms of the retransmission rate, throughput, and round-trip time.